There is no resolution yet on a proposed $7 billion Canadian-U.S. oil pipeline, as President Obama has continued to delay his decision on whether to approve it. Before the construction and operation of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline expansion can progress, the President, through the U.S. State Department’s permitting process, must grant final approval — an approval which has been in political limbo for the past three years.

In a bill passed in July by the U.S. House of Representatives, the North American-Made Energy Security Act obliged the President to decide by November 1 whether to move forward with the 1,700-mile pipeline, which would transport Canadian crude oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska, and then on to the Gulf Coast.

As The New American reported two weeks ago, political opposition and environmental rhetoric hover around Obama’s verdict to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

Recently, Al Gore was permitted an opportunity to indulge his obsession with “global warming” at the Aspen Institute, and the former Vice President had some rather choice words for critics of his anthropogenic conception of “climate change.”

They are the same people, he declared, who continue “washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again.” Yet they have become so successful at dissembling, we have reached a point where it is now unacceptable in “mixed” or “bi-partisan company to use the godd***ed word ‘climate.’” On three consecutive occasions during his speech, Gore referred to his opponents’ alternative accounts of climate change as “bull****!”

Should energy consumers pay extra taxes to fund government-mandated and subsidized renewable energy technologies? "Absolutely yes," says John Bryson, President Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary. He made the remark at a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California in 2009 and went on to extol the virtues of hidden rates in California, a state encumbered with some of the nation's highest electricity and unemployment rates.

Bryson, retired CEO of the electric utility Southern California Edison (SCE) and its parent company Edison International, excused the practice, saying, "That's been a part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities for as long as I've been close to it."

In recent years, former Vice President Al Gore has been the object of a great deal of humor — and ire — for his extremist views and hypocritical actions when it comes to the environment. But a bizarre rant the man who was once heartbeats away from becoming president of these United States calls forth a term one which Americans want nowhere near the Oval Office: Unhinged.

The ideology of manmade global warming has fallen on hard times in recent years due to a series of revelations that have fundamentally undermined the credibility of the “science” and its advocates. Beginning with “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” and continuing through such public spectacles as the implosion of the December 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, polling data has repeatedly demonstrated that public acceptance of the claims of climate change scientists have fallen on hard times.

Of all of the myriad agencies created and maintained by the Executive Branch, few have proven to be as detrimental to the United States as the Environmental Protection Agency. Since its birth under President Nixon’s executive order in 1970, the mission of the EPA has been to protect human health and the environment. The mission has been mutilated since the start, as the environment (or at least what we are led to believe is the environment) has taken so much precedent that the human health aspect — whether it is the physical, mental, social or economic sort — has been deemed worthless in comparison.

More often than not, it has appeared that the power brokers in Washington use the environment (and therefore the EPA) as a tool, a compelling means by which to exert its brand of total control over economic functions it would otherwise have a difficult time with without such propaganda. Over time, the EPA has touched everything from the food we eat (from over-the-top dust regulations to clean water rules that strip property rights) to the energy we use (telling oil and gas companies where, how and when to extract much-needed resources, creating a dependency on foreign sources) to the air we breathe (instituting utterly insane emissions standards for things as simple as portable fuel tanks). All of those rules and thousands more add to the cost of doing business and therefore the cost of living. The actual negative impact on the American consumer is in the hundreds of billions per year as we end up paying for these regulations at the market, fuel pump, and department store.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to redefine "diesel fuel" so it can expand regulations in natural-gas drilling. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce claims the measure is necessary to "protect human health" from fuels used in hydraulic fracturing, a process that injects high-pressure fluids and sand into shale formations deep beneath the Earth's surface to tap natural-gas reserves.

U.S. Representatives Henry Waxman (Calif.), Edward Markey (Mass.), Diana DeGette (Colo.), and Rush Holt (N.J.) sent a letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson this week, in which they contend that hydraulic fracturing providers are circumventing the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and using diesel fuels without regard to concerns about groundwater contamination.

Environmental contention stirs as discussions cultivate over the long-delayed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport Canadian crude oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada, to southern parts of the United States. Due to environmental concerns, lawsuits from oil refineries, and opposition in the U.S. Congress, the project has been on hiatus, as it lingers in the State Department’s permitting process, awaiting President Obama’s approval. In urging the President to act, Republicans and business leaders allege that the $7 billion expansion will create 20,000 jobs — 13,000 construction jobs and 7,000 manufacturing jobs — and ease U.S. dependence on foreign oil. TransCanada, the Canadian company that proposed the expansion, estimates that the pipeline would deliver over one million barrels of oil a day to the U.S. "We could help reduce the amount of imports from the Middle East," asserted TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha, "which would ensure energy security for the United States."

As GM share prices plunge so do Chevy Volt sales, according to the latest auto sales figures. Throughout July, a whopping 125 Chevy Volts were sold, making the seemingly low 281 units sold in February a groundbreaking month.

GM spokeswoman Michelle Bunker attributed the fallback to "supply constraints," alleging that GM was "virtually sold out" and supply was down nationwide. But Mark Modica, associate fellow at the National Legal and Policy Center, confirmed Bunker’s assertion was false, as he wrote on FoxNews.com:

During a July 20 Department of Education event in Washington, D.C. — the third of its kind this summer — area schoolchildren were given access to free books, two of which featured Nickelodean's cartoon icons Spongebob and Dora the Explorer pushing an environmentalist agenda and encouraging children to accept the widely debunked notion of man-made global warming.

The books are part of Nickelodeon’s “Big Green Help Series,” a campaign launched by the network in order to teach children to help protect the Earth.

As noted by CNS News, however, one of the books takes a particularly controversial position, purporting not only that global warming exists, but that it is in fact a man-made phenomenon, and can only be solved if humans change their behavior:

The Obama administration has unveiled a new round of fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, which are expected to require mileage gains of nearly double the current figure. The new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards will last through the year 2025.

The proposal mandates that all passenger vehicles sold in 2025 average approximately 55 miles per gallon. CNN explains, “They’d ramp up to that level over seven years, starting in 2017 when current rules end.”

By contrast, the current standards for all 2011 cars and trucks mandate that vehicles average 27.3 mpg. By 2017, they will have to reach 34.1 mpg.